This Brilliant Dance
by apbother
Summary: Seven years after RENT, the bohos are back, and they're all just a little bit crazier. With tons of fluffy flashbacks and not so fluffy ones for all canon pairings, and some modernday drama, they're about to discover the brilliant dance that is life.
1. The Leather Jacket Brigade

06/01/2007 13:42:00

Disclaimer: Rent is not mine. It alllll belongs to Johnathon Larson… Baby Angel, however, is totally mine…

A/N: This is pretty much going to be a bunch of flashbacks, followed by a "reuniting of the bohemians story". Cliché, yes…but oh so delicious. Like French fries. Corny and bad for you…but really, really good. PS. This story starts to suck towards the end because a I got really really mad at it. Just so you know.

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From a distance, the five year old could have been mistaken for the lost soul of someone you knew, at one time or another. She had the distinctly disheveled look of someone who had spent much of his or her time wandering from place to place, without really knowing who or what she was looking for. Realistically, she was a small five year old in a cafe who had happened to look particularly tired that day, perhaps having had ingested a bit too much ice-cream with her friends at a slumber party the night before.

But as Thomas B. Collins flipped through the Life and Arts section of the Wall Street Journal, the hard metal café chair digging into his ass, and, _goddamnit_, assisting in the complete ruin of his already crappy day, (complete with lukewarm tea and insolent students who just fucking did not _understand_), the girl (unaccompanied and alone with a ham and cheese sandwich) struck him as particularly…peculiar for some reason or another.

She was, indeed, the average five year old, with a small frame and long black hair, dark skinned and probably Latina. And because Thomas B. Collins was very, very bored, and because he was old and sick and having a really, _really_ shitty day, this girl made him rather sad. And intrigued. Simply because she reminded him of someone who he had known at one time, someone who would have been considered, by the standards of the average American, to be a complete waste of a life. Someone who had fucked themselves up beyond belief, someone who had always been there for him. Someone who had been best friends with the object of the last meaningful relationship he'd ever had…someone, whose name was Mimi Marquez.

As he attempted to observe the girl without looking like a total pervert, he noticed three very intriguing things. First, that she seemed to be looking for someone. Second, that she seemed rather unsatisfied with her ham and cheese sandwich, which was intriguing simply because Mimi hated, _hated_ ham and cheese sandwich's.

However, there was no way to know when Mimi's last ham and cheese sandwich had been, because he had not seen any of the old group for at least five years. Mimi had gotten out of the hospital and left with Roger a year later for who knows where, her health failing and, last time he had seen her, with the flu, Mark had gone off to California to pursue a career as a filmmaker and had not been seen since, and Maureen and Joanne had moved to Jersey with their twin daughters, where Benny and his wife currently resided. As far as he knew, anyways.

Collins himself had been far to busy moving from meaningless relationship to meaningless relationship…the only thing that kept him from just letting himself go until he died was the thought of what Angel would say if he saw Thomas B. Collins wasting his life away entirely. The thought was amusing, in a rather morbid way.

Alas, Thomas now noted that the third and final very intriguing thing about this little girl was that she was crying. He had not noticed it at first, because this Mini-Mimi (as he had christened her) was not a sort of wailing crier. She was crying very quietly into her ham and cheese sandwich, and absolutely no one had noticed.

So, Thomas B. Collins, being the kind and loving soul that he was, (though his students might disagree to the that notion…not surprising, as they seemed to disagree to all his other ones), got up to comfort the little girl. After all, if you were in a café and saw a small child crying alone on the streets of Manhattan, would you not get up to assist the child? They were, after all, at The Bagel House on Times Square. Not, surely, the place for a child.

Anyways, he approached the girl, quietly as so not to scare her, and because he had had experiences with random strangers approaching him in shops, he made sure that his first words were neither threatening nor scary in anyway.

"Are you ok, honey?" he said cautiously. "Is your mommy here?"

The little girl looked up from her plate.

"No," she said robustly, "I will not help you find your puppy. And I don't want any candy. And I can scream really, really loud,"

Collins resisted the urge to laugh. He had never met a girl this age with so much…spunk.

"It's ok, sweetie, I just wanted to see if you were O.K. My name is Collins. What's yours?"

"Mmph," The girl said, looking down at her plate.

"It's alright!" Collins said. I'm not going to hurt you…I just wanted to-"

But what Tom Collins wanted to do, the world was not about to find out, because the little girl screamed. And, true to her word, it was really, really loud.

"DADDY!"

_Oh shit, oh shit oh shit. _Not only was his day really, really crappy, some tough guy was about to come and beat the shit out of him. Great.

A tall, thing guy with blonde hair hiding his face ran out of the bathrooms.

"I'm right here, sweetie, what's up? It's ok, who's bothering you?"

Tom Collins straightened up and prepared to explain, but the blonde guy had already reached his daughter and was picking her up, and without looking at him, said,

"Look, buddy, I don't know what the fuck you thought you were doing but stay the hell away from my kid, got it?"

And it really did look like Thomas B. Collins was about to get the shit beaten out of him (one tends to assume, when faced with a man in a leather jacket slurring threats, that he is indeed going to get the shit beaten out of him.

However, when the man turned around, and a flash or recognition crossed his face, Thomas B. Collins found himself enveloped in a bear hug.

"Thomas!"

"Uh…"

It was when the man pulled away that Thomas B. Collins recognized the face of Roger Davis, gaunt and barely alive, and with the same worn look as his daughter, but with a shining cheerfulness that was distinctly Roger-like all the same.

"How have you been, man?"

"I've been pretty good," Collins said slowly, "I just got back from MIT… _again_…(for Roger's face had been caught with amusement)...is this your daughter?"

"Yeah, this is Angel. Angel, remember the man named Collins I always told you about? This is him."

"Hi, Angel," Collins said, honored at the allusion to his former lover in the girl's name, "I'm sorry I scared you earlier, but you did a good job calling your Daddy like that,"

Angel nodded, looking over her daddy's shoulder at the Ham and Cheese sandwich as if it were her worst enemy.

"Yeah," Roger said, "Good job, kid. I see we have yet to eat our sandwich."

"It's gross."

"Angel you know we can't afford-"

"I know, Daddy. I'm five. That doesn't mean that I'm gonna eat the stupid sandwich."

"Don't say stupid."

Collins resisted the urge to laugh. "Five? So is she-"

"Mimi's, yeah. But she-uh-died when Angel was two months old. Labor was really bad and then-"

"I'm sorry,"

"Don't be. I've got a Mini-Mimi right here,"

"Honestly, I was thinking that when I first saw her crying,"

Roger set his daughter down and looked her in the eye. "You were crying?"

"No," Angel said stubbornly.

Roger laughed. "Yeah, it's been a long five years,"

"Tell me about it,"

So Thomas B. Collins and Roger Davis sat down to reflect on their shitty days and catch up on life, completely unaware that just a few streets over, on Broadway, Mark Cohen and his wife were setting up their cameras to shoot, where, just meters away, Maureen and Joanne Johnson-Jefferson were running down the street, chasing their run away foster son and twin daughters, who were about to run into the cameras of a Mr. And Mrs. Cohen.


	2. And So The Rabbit Says

09/01/2007 14:42:00

This story is going to be like a collection of flashbacks, mostly Mimi/roger one shots, featuring how each of the bohemians got to where they are today. Not exactly in order and perhaps a bit AU, but I still have this gigantic plot bunny, so this is how its gonna go. Also, I don't really have a lot of free time, so updates might be a little slow, but nothing drastic. Thanks for reading, please review. Flames are welcomed with open arms.

P.S…If you start to hate Mark's wife…that's a good thing. Haha like her name? The opinions are hers only and not mine at all, btw./

_**Chapter Two: And So Then The Rabbit Says, How 'bout that Schnitzel?**_

Maureen Johnson-Jefferson was happy. Sort of. If you asked Maureen Johnson-Jefferson how she thought her life was going, to this very moment, she'd say it was going rather well.

But Maureen Johnson-Jefferson's life was going well, although not by her own standards. By her partner's standards, her parent's standards, and the standards of her neighbors and friends, she was happy. She had a great life.

Though beneath the surface, beneath every hug and kiss and lunch packed and every other stay at home mom chore she had to do, it was becoming more and more apparent to her that she was not the kid person she'd thought she was, and that her life was horribly inadequate.

As much as she loved her daughter and various foster children with all her heart and soul, she could not help but cry at night, when her partner was working late. How she loathed the sticky fingers of kindergartners, crawling over her for the sake of crawling! How she hated the incredible innocence, that had more than once made her remind herself that there was no evil interior, no secret master plan, to the kindness in these beings!

It was these thoughts that preoccupied her as she strolled down the street, her hand clutched in that of her partner, Joanne Jefferson-Johnson. Ahead of her, she could see someone setting up film equipment, probably for the Bridgeport Film Festival that was to be held at the run down old Nederlander Theatre that week, the same reason that she had come. Well, not necessarily. Technically, they were there because Joanne had a big case there, but they had told the kids, seven-year-old Francie and fourteen-year-old Jonathon, that this was a chance to see the big city.

Neither Maureen nor Joanne had been in New York for about five years, having avoided it very carefully for their own separate reasons. Maureen was unsure as to Joanne's, but she had simply avoided it because she had assumed that everyone would be gone.

After Mimi and Roger had randomly took off five years ago, Mark had stayed on his own for about a day when Collins came back, if only to stay a week and announce that he was going back to MIT. After Collins had left, Mark said goodbye and headed for California to take the film job he'd been offered there last Christmas but had never taken. Maureen had no idea how this faired, or whether Mimi, Roger or Collins was alive, because about six months after Mark left, they'd flown to Massachusetts to get married. 

All she knew was that when Mimi and Roger had left, Mimi had been clean for about a year, and had good t-cell count but a horrible case of the flu, and Roger's t-cells had been fading rather quickly. She knew Mark had married a girl named Marie because she'd been invited to the wedding, but hadn't gone because that was right after they'd adopted then two-year-old Francie. That had been about five years ago, and she hadn't heard from anyone since. Maureen and Joanne had lived in New York for about a year after their marriage when they'd moved to Jersey, settled down, and adopted baby Francie.

So here she was, strolling down Broadway, with Francie and Jonathan running ahead, when suddenly, Francie ran right into one of the cameras of the filmmakers.

"Francie!" Joanne shrieked, running ahead to attend to her children. Maureen caught up to Jonathan, who was cackiling at his foster sister's folly.

As Joanne held her crying daughter, Maureen attempted to explain to the young women who was obviously not happy about her camera being knocked over.

"I'm sorry," she explained apologetically to the blonde, "But you know how kids are. There's not any damage, is there?"

"Yeah I know how kids are, that's why I don't have any. And there had better not be damage."

"I'm sorry," Maureen said. "Really. Maureen Johnson-Jefferson. This is my daughter, Francie,"

She jestured to the now sniffiling girl. Francie waved. "I'm sorry," she said.

The woman looked long and hard at her for a minute, then turned back to Maureen.

"Listen, get your stupid dyke family the hell away from me, got it. They honestly shouldn't allow-"

But she was cut off by her husband, who stood up with a sigh. 

"God, Mary-sue, can't you just leave it?"

"No, Mark, I can't, because-"

But exactly what her reasoning was, was cut of by a loud shriek as Maureen threw her arms around the long-lost Mark Cohen.

"Marky! Oh my god! I missed you! Is this your wife? She's so pretty! (Mary-sue looked taken aback and a bit disgusted.) Wow! Its been too long!"

"Mo! Jo!" Mark said, a look of realization crossing his face. "Hey! Is this your daughter? She's so cute!"

"Yeah, this is Francie, and our foster son Jonathan," This was Joanne.

"Cool, cool," Mark laughed. "Uh, guys, this is my wife, Mary-sue."

"Hello," Mary-Sue said coolly.

Maureen then noticed what was so different about Mark. He actually looked cool. She shrugged inwardly…perhaps California did that to people.

"Hey," Mark said, "If you guys aren't doing anything, let's go to the Times Square Bagel House and catch up,"

"Sure," Maureen shrugged. "Guys?"

At Joanne's nod, the group headed off towards The Bagel House, completely unaware that in that very same house, two old friends were also doing some catching up…


	3. Ooh La La

01/03/2007 15:54:00

Greetings, and apologies for the long wait. I'm finally moving into my dream house, so life's been totally hectic, not to mention I've had writer's block. Lol, um, ok so this is the first flashback chapter…in all its hastily written deliciousness. C'est ici pour ton… um…amusant! Wow I can't write. Anyways, here goes. Btw: the "me" in this chapter is not necessarily me. This is a third person omniscient narrative, and, as such, I reserve the right to be, well, the narrative. Ooh La La is the name of a song by Rod Stewart and The Faces, or just The Faces, which is a really great song that I suggest you steal. I mean, download.

**_Ooh La La_**

Realistically, Mark was not alone. Realistically, Mark was just not in the presence of anyone else. Now, I know some of you out there are going to come up to me and say, "That's not true, I looked it up and alone means that you aren't in the presence of anyone else," Well, that's because Mark wasn't thinking realistically. To Mark, he was absolutely and completely alone. There was no one to hold him, no one to say that the loved him. Except his mother, and even though Mark was personally against traditional family labels and roles, he could not bring himself to run back to his mother. Not when Cindy was married with two kids and an amazing job.

Realistically, it was maybe two in the morning on a hot summer's night when even the sheets sweat. But if you had learned from the first paragraph, you'd know that Mark was not thinking realistically. To Mark, it was the darkest, most vile and hellish hour of the entire day, so late that it didn't even belong on the regular clock. It was a secret hour that no one knew existed, a splotch that remained off of clocks by a mathematical error causing one to assume it two in the afternoon. The heat was such that him from the inside out, swallowing him up whole into a dark, evil sleep that he would never wake up from. Which he had been diluted to believe that he desperately wanted. And thus, although every fiber of Mark's being ached to sleep, the side of his brain taken over from the madness kept it from him. Though he desperately craved it's sweet nectar, actions next door kept it just beyond his grasp.

Realistically, Roger and Mimi where awake next door, whispering. Every once in a while someone would get up, the mattress creaking loudly every time someone shifted, pad to the bathroom, retch violently, and then return as quickly as they came. But to Mark, Roger and Mimi where next door…whispering. Alas he had found the one thing that was not diluted by the heat. The key to insanity is not dealing with it but finding the one point where every thing meets in the middle between sense and insanity, which Mark had just found.

The really funny thing about the whole situation (which was really not all that funny at all) was that he could hear every single word they were saying, but he refused to process any of it, as if he were listening half asleep. Later, he found he could go back and listen to little snippets of words that had slipped through unnoticed. Marriage, Leaving, Condom, Summer, Hot. Car, Heat, Sex, Father. Words that didn't even make sense were stringing together in awkward sentences that flew through his brain. Next door, Fist meets Wall, and Mark is wide-awake.

"-sucks," Roger's voice resonates through the loft.

"-car?" Mimi's responds.

"Not- tell-flu-Mark," he can barely make out what they are saying, words drifting away before slipping from his grasp.

Someone gets up and tiptoes towards the bathroom. Through the lightness of step, Mark has gathered this person to be Mimi. He hears retching, she is obviously quite ill. Mark considers getting up but immediately stops himself.

"I love you to death," Roger says.

Mark laughs aloud at the irony of this sentence and that it must be the first one he hears.

But the resounding silence is so loud that Mark immediately regrets it.

"-he heard us?" More snippets.

"-check" Snippets.

He hears footsteps, heavy ones, and then a knock on his door that Mark is unsurprised to hear.

"Mark?" Roger's voice is soft and yet it cracks in the dark.

"Yeah?" Mark finds his voice dry and rough from lack of use.

"Uh, can I come in for a second?"

"Yeah, sure."

The door swings open, and there is Roger, standing there in a pair of dark green athletic pants that leave his grey boxers showing and his muscle tone chest, which is slicked with sweat, bare. Behind him stands Mimi, her dark hair mussed and in a baby-doll nightie that Mark feels improper to be seeing.

"How long have you been up?" Mimi asks, which is stupid because she might have at least pretended to be sorry for barging into his room at such a late hour.

"All night," Mark says, "But don't worry cause I wasn't listening to anything,"

"That's what we came to talk to you about," Roger says, "We're sorry for coming in here at two o clock in the morning like this but you were up anyways and we need to tell you something. We are about to hand you a piece for information that cannot be repeated, not to anyone. Not Collins, not Maureen, not Joanne, no one."

Mark nods, unsure of this news.

Mimi takes a deep breath. "Mark?" she says, and it reminds Roger of exactly the way she told him, "I'm pregnant,"

Mark's mouth is dry, and he forces out a nod.

"You cannot tell anyone," she continues, "Because Roger and I have come to a conclusion about this particular matter,"

Again, Mark nods, his mouth regaining it's moisture.

"We're leaving." She tells him, leaning against the wall, "For I have no idea. But I kinda want to meet Roger's family and well, honestly, I don't think I'm going to survive this pregnancy,"

Mark notices Roger's face hardens as she says this.

"So we've decided to hit the road, head west, I don't know. But we're going to pack up some stuff and leave tonight. My Uncle's scored us a deal with a car so we're gonna walk to over to the car lot on 11th and pick it up and then we'll be out of here. Mark, please don't tell anyone? You're like my little brother and I love you so much but just tell people I've got the flu or something and that's why I've been sick. The last thing we need is everyone trying to stop us."

"I love you, man," Roger says, embracing Mark in a quick hug. He pulls away and the two stand back, looking at him.

"Goodbye," he whispers, and Mimi and Roger nod, dissaperaing back into their room. But it is suddenly desperately hot, too hot, and Mark falls back onto his pillow and immediately drifts away to sleep, where he will wake the next day wondering whether it was all just a surreal dream or not until he finds the note on the kitchen table.


End file.
